Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> All of those changes are unnecessary.  Xvesa runs fine on
> a standard BL2 installation.
>
> I finally sorted out the Xvesa problem on my system.  It had
> nothing to do with Linux.  It was caused by DOS.  My CONFIG.SYS
> is rather complicated and something in there is fouling VM86
> (I think).  I haven't worked out yet what is doing it -- all
> I know is, when I bypass that CONFIG.SYS, Xvesa works fine.
>
> You can actually run Xvesa from the BL2 ramdisk.  Just copy
> it to the /tmp directory (which provides an extra 4mb of
> space on systems with spare RAM) and execute it.  I have
> even run Xvesa from the two-floppy version of BL2 (there
> is space on the first floppy for a gzipped copy of Xvesa).
>
That's interesting.  I was just sure xvesa could enhance BL (one of the
reasons I sent you the DamnSmallLinux disk).  I wish I'd tried it on the
ramdrive version first, though :) .  Getting to the gui really is the
payoff for most users, so simplifying that aspect of trialling/setting up
BL should make a big difference.  Of course there's not much graphical in
the ramdisk version or the floppy version to take advantage of a gui, but
I still think most folks would be delighted at the simplified setup it
could give.  Just out of curiosity: the ramdisk/floppy versions don't have
installpkg, do they?  If not, I guess you copied it over from your DOS
partition to do the install of xvesa?

> I've only just started playing with Xvesa, but it appears to
> have considerable potential.  At the very least, I'll have a
> look at ditching Xvga16 and using Xvesa instead.  However, some
> other interesting possibilities come to mind:
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> A two-floppy version of BL2 that automatically configures the
> local network card, connects to an X application server and
> comes up as an X terminal.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> A non-ramdisk BL (including X, icewm, pkgtool, manpages, PCMCIA)
> that comes as a 5mb zip file.  Unzips in DOS and installs to its
> own ext2 partition on systems with as little as 4mb RAM.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
I'll look forward to hearing about further development.  This will be BL
2.2, no doubt?  Btw, I've got the solution to using xvesa with serial
mice.  I think it basically involves making /dev/mouse a symlink to
/dev/ttySX (X= the serial port number your serial mouse is on).  I know
specifying /dev/ttySX on the command line when starting xvesa doesn't work
- I tried it, and heard others describe the same failure.  On the other
hand, when I reported the snippet of info I found on DSL forums about
symlinking /dev/mouse to /dev/ttySX on the RULE forum to someone who was
trying to get kdrive to work with serial mice, they reported back that
they succeeded in getting the mouse operational by doing that.  So, I have
pretty good indicators that serial mice can be used with xvesa by making
this symlink.

> Xvesa does not use XF86Config.  But I believe it can be started
> using startx and .xinitrc
>
DSL had its own peculiar startx script that called a script called xsetup
from the user's home dir (xsetup in turn just contained the command line
arguments for xvesa - 800x600x32 , etc).  Why this circuitous way of
starting the gui I never quite figured out.

James